This invention deals generally with agricultural equipment and more specifically with an apparatus to complete the wrapping of a partially wrapped bale produced by a “round baler”.
Round balers with the capability of wrapping the bales in plastic film have become common machines on the agricultural landscape. The benefits of the wrapped bales are that they protect the crop material from the weather, encourage crops to ferment to enhance the nutritional value, and eliminate the need for costly storage facilities. Some machines in the prior art are built to pick up formed round bales from the fields, wrap them, and then put them back down, but such an approach requires significant manpower and machinery. Other machines can be pulled behind a round baler, accept the bale from the baler and wrap it as the baler forms the next bale.
However, there are several round balers that take advantage of the action of the baler itself, the rotation of a cylinder of crop material, to wrap the cylinder by inserting plastic film from a supply roll into the bale forming chamber. This allows the bale rotation in the forming chamber to catch the plastic film and wrap it around the bale's cylindrical surface. A particular example of this type of round baler is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,230,193 by Underhill et al. With such a wrapper, it is possible to furnish excess wrapping material extending off the non-cylindrical ends of cylindrical bales for later use in sealing the ends.
One approach in the prior art has been to build machines that rotate the bale around its axis to wrap the cylindrical surface and to sequentially or simultaneously rotate the bale in a horizontal plane to wrap the ends of the bale. Another approach has been to use a so called satellite system in which the bale is rotated around its axis to cover the cylindrical surface, and the ends of the cylindrical bale are wrapped by a supply roller that moves around the bale in a horizontal plane.
The problem with such machines are their great complexity. Almost all of them operate independently of the baler itself, even if they are towed behind the baler. Furthermore, they all must produce a duplicate motion that the baler has just completed, the rotation of the cylindrical bale around its cylindrical axis.
It would be very beneficial to have a simple machine that merely wraps the ends of a bale, the cylindrical surface of which was already wrapped by a round baler, and to include that machine right on the frame of the round baler, so that it could be operated by the baler operator and even use the same continuous film material that covers the cylindrical surface.